Don’t Leave Your Entire Heart There

thread and metal installation

April 2026, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia

Solo exhibition I Live in Realities That Are Not Completely True, curated by Deja Becaj, Lapidarium in Gallery Bozidar Jakac

The idea that memory or emotion lives in the heart is very old. In ancient Egypt and Greece, the heart was seen as a source of wisdom. Aristotle argued that the heart governed sensation, cognition and movement, as it pumped pneuma (breath or soul) through the veins and sent messages throughout the body. This cardiocentric hypothesis persists in everyday language: you can be heartbroken or know things by heart. Your heart sinks, it can be soft, cold, heavy or big. Sometimes you want to get to the heart of the matter, mean things from the bottom of your heart or have a change of heart. You can leave it with someone or somewhere.

Don’t Leave Your Entire Heart There draws from interpersonal relationships, touching on community and the inescapable ties between human beings. The salvaged yarn spools once functioned as a material to bind together structure, passing through many hands and contributing to the making of countless garments. In the context of Nika Batista’s work, they become the connective tissue, gently stretching throughout multiple rooms. As they once held together a clothing pattern, they now carry the symbolic weight of the invisible threads that bind people to one another. 

The abandoned origin of the material is also crucial. These threads persist beyond their initial role or system of meaning, much like human connections persist beyond specific encounters. Yet they remain marked by fragility – not every connection holds. Their delicateness mirrors the fleetingness of relationships: they break, they loosen, they fade. And still, their impact lingers, like the tear in the spool.

The threads also hold, support, and carry tension. They evoke how human entanglement inevitably brings with it a sense of responsibility – whether acknowledged or quietly ignored. Such responsibility does not exist only on a symbolic level.  It becomes tangible in the ways we respond to others, especially in situations that call for care, attention, or emotional presence … for empathy.

The first instinct when someone shares something troubling is often to relate. To offer a parallel experience in an attempt to ease the sense of isolation. Another common response is to give advice. Both gestures may come from a genuine place, yet they are often shaped by a need to bridge the discomfort of the moment, to fill the silence with something to do. Yet in that moment, when someone’s vulnerability is placed in another’s care, the listeners’ role is not necessarily to resolve, but to receive. To remain present without immediately translating the other’s experience into your own. Trying to understand often reaches further than trying to relate.

Text by curator Deja Becaj